SNEAK IN PEACE
Sneak in Peace is a home for luxury discovery. It carries 34,000 products from 450 brands, Gucci and Balenciaga through to Wales Bonner, Rick Owens and Maison Margiela, and it runs films about the people who make them. Its homepage is SneakTV, a 24-hour channel where everything on screen can be bought while it plays, and the sale completes at the brand's own store. Its homepage is SneakTV, a television channel that runs 24 hours a day and sells what it shows.
A Luxury Discovery Platform We Named, Branded And Built
Sneak in Peace was founded by Dominic Jacob and Mark Bage, and it arrived here as a conviction and nothing else. They had a clear idea of what was wrong with the way sneakers were being sold, and no brand to say it with. We took it from the name up, and we have made the films for it ever since.
Built Against What The Sneaker Internet Was Doing
Sneak in Peace became one of the largest luxury sneaker sites in the world. It was built against everything the sneaker internet was doing at the time. Resale belonged to bots and drops, a secondary market that treated a shoe as an asset and the person buying it as a trade. It worked commercially and it produced some of the least interesting retail design of the decade.
Sneakers deserved to be treated the way fashion treats fashion. The same photography standard, the same editorial instinct, the same willingness to let something sit on a page and be looked at. "Never in a hurry" began as a line about drop culture and became the design brief.
The build was unusually free. No committee, no feature list to argue down, no launch date set by somebody else's calendar. We are a Shopify agency and this was the rare chance to find out how far the platform actually goes when nobody is asking for a compromise.
Sneak in Peace E-Commerce Web Design & Build
What Shopify Does When Nobody Says No
The name came first and it came quickly, which almost never happens. Sneak in Peace is a joke you only get once and then stop noticing, which is the right kind of joke for a name you have to live with. The identity is quiet around it, a serif with some warmth in it, navy, off-white, no shouting.
The luxury e-commerce website went further than the platform is usually asked to go. Product pages that read like editorial. Films given the same room as the products. A store that never once looks like a store built from a theme.
The commercial model shaped the design as much as the brand did. Sneak in Peace earns a commission on the sales it sends to the brands it carries, with the sale completing at the brand's own store. That changes the job of a product page. It is not there to close, it is there to make someone want the thing enough to go and get it. Almost every decision on the site follows from that.
Television, Rebuilt For Luxury
SneakTV came later and changed what the business was. Films run in sequence all day, one into the next, and everything on screen can be bought while it plays. Nobody has to leave the story to shop it.
A grid asks someone to choose before they know what they want. A channel does the opposite, it shows them something and lets the wanting happen first. Watching it is closer to television than to browsing, which was the point. No feeds. No noise.
Most of what plays is the campaign films themselves, running at the length they were made. A house spends months on one. A director, a crew, a cast, a location, the same thinking that decides what the catwalk looks like and what the season is about. Then it gets cut into the few seconds that have to work as an ad, and that is the only version most people ever see. SneakTV runs the whole film.
Underneath the campaigns is the footage that never made them. The atelier at six in the morning. The final fitting. The founder who still signs off every sample. All of it gets shot, most of it gets cut. Those are the films we make for the channel. Backstage access, craft close-ups, the muse interview, a day with the brand, the founder story. The films are about the people, the luxury craft and the vision in making the things.
Taking part is light. A small senior crew, a day, an edit the brand signs off. The brand keeps the film and uses it wherever it likes. There is no cost to appear.
A campaign runs for six weeks and goes dark. A film on SneakTV keeps playing.
Sneak in Peace E-Commerce Web Design & Build
When The Category Fell Over
The hype economics thinned out first, as supply caught up with the premium that made resale work. Then luxury e-commerce itself came apart. Farfetch, which had been the argument for the whole category, needed an emergency sale and saw its listed company wound up. Matchesfashion went into administration and closed. Others further down the list are still going through it now.
The businesses that fell over had bought their customers. Sneak in Peace never had the budget to, so it never learned how, and demand pulled it somewhere nobody had planned. People came for sneakers and asked for everything else. The site became a luxury discovery platform because that is what its audience decided it was.
450,000 Visits A Month, None Of Them Bought
450,000 visits a month, all organic. 30,000 members. 34,000 products from 450 brands.
Dominic Jacob went full time on it after launch. Stephen Mai joined later, from i-D, and before that MTV, VICE, LADbible, Boiler Room and ASOS.
Tech, travel, clothing, watches, luggage, handbags and eyewear are all going on next. The platform is built. The audience is watching.
Let’s Work Together
We work with fashion and luxury brands at every stage, from early brand identity work to e-commerce builds and full campaign production. If you'd like to talk about a project, we'd love to hear from you.
Client
SNEAK IN PEACE
Project
A LUXURY DISCOVERY PLATFORM, BUILT FROM THE NAME UP
CREDITS
MARK BAGE
DOMINIC JACOB
SERVICES
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